The start of every New Year in technology circles is filled with predictions from Analysts, Investors, and commentators about all the new and fascinating innovations and technology trends that are supposed to unfold this year and beyond. We decided, towards the start of this year, to review these trends and look for what might be a stand out mega trend from the point of view of (1) User Experience - both for users who are consumers or associated with an enterprise, (2) Organizational experience – to denote organizational level equivalent of user experience, the typical manner in which an organization/company conducts its business internally and externally as a collection or a cast of users (3) Market experience – to denote the market level equivalent of user experience, on how a collection or cast of users interact with other collections or casts of users, indicative of how competition, cooperation, external participants can alter the value creation dynamics of an industry or ecosystem. The terms Organizational experience and Market experience aren’t so much the ideas to focus on here but the simple aspect that User Experience truly has a cascading effect through entire organizations, ecosystems and economies. Innovation trends and technologies therefore that are able to impact and transform User experience at those three levels can make a spectacular difference, drive growth and transformation for long periods of time. Evidence of such a transformation can be found looking back at the change that mobile solutions and technologies have had in the years and the decade when it has truly impacted User Experience at all those three levels. In fact some would even argue that since Apple released the iPhone in 2007, User experience as a term has more aptly become Mobile User Experience.
So using that simple measure of User Experience as a guide for peeking into the future, the single most important mega trend that we think has the potential to impact and reshape all of our user experiences at all those levels as we know it is the Internet of things (IoT). The IoT as the word itself suggests is the world of smarter things, things that have computing intelligence and ability, things that are able to connect to each other over the Internet, things that may be able to intelligently automate a lot of different mundane (and perhaps non mundane) activities and that can help us leverage technology in areas where we could never have imagined before. The IoT, in our view is a very logical extension of the mobile world, mobile gave us computing ability that never leaves quite literally our personal space, and that in turn gave us a completely new way of looking at everything. And the IoT we believe is a direct extension and an amplifier of that into things in life that will get smarter and be able to communicate with each other and us. Things that will cater to our own experiences, cater to our own sense of purpose in life. One important point to note about this discussion on the importance of IoT is that we’re not really comparing it as a mega trend to the technologies that we’re adopting today at a massive scale such as cloud, in memory computing, business networks. Those in themselves will lay an amazing foundation to bring everything together, and tip us to that perfect IoT inflection point in the very near future. IoT has the potential to gradually and ultimately improve the ability for companies to serve their customers and for companies to even compete against each other and change
the nature of competition itself, it will have major implications on security, risk and governance as we know it. Imagine a world where almost every product/thing has the intelligence and ability to become part of an omni-channel and instantly connect a user/customer with a product maker or service provider and other participants in an economy.
With such an enormous disruption and transformation potential for IoT, we believe that one of the most important questions that you can ask of yourself this year as a CEO, CDO (Chief Digital Officer), CIO or any serious Innovation and Growth focused leader will be “Do I have an Internet of things strategy?” or “What is my IoT strategy?”
Jomy Pidiath
Global UX & Mobile Strategy Services | SAP
Follow me on twitter https://twitter.com/jomypidiath
Ashutosh Kumar
Global UX & Mobile Strategy Services | SAP
Follow me on twitter https://twitter.com/ashutoshgroup
